Sunday, October 25, 2015

part un ..with the form factor of a hand, the thing can control any legacy actuator - possessed of several simple electromechanical motors, a set of fiber optics in the finger tips, leading back to a camera in the raspberry pi controller at the wrist, and a light, to look at stuff in the dark (extra-sensory perspective), the thing can run around your house and turn stuff on and off - it might be a bit scary (especially if you have several of them, and you see them going up stairs, or hanging off the old thermotat controller or VHS video or microwave) but through online legacy device manuals, these are the new universal remote control - instead of getting a remote for each device, even devices which have no digital/IR/WiFi/Bluetooth/Zigbee/Audio interface can now be managed via an app on your phone which talks to your family of things...

this is cheaper, more deployable than expensive new tech, more secure (modulo any recurrences of early "hands of orlac" bugs), and can deal with tricky situations (e.g. get spider out of bath, unblock toilet) that most IoT engineers blanche at the thought of (which).

these things can turn your old dial phone into a cellular like device (indeed allow you to dial remotely using your cell phone) can take readings from utility meters and scan, OCR and email them to you, and then let you turn down the heating or turn up the gas as you can afford, without leaving the comfort of your internet cafe.

no cloud needed. no nudges or winks from a psychology/marketing department, just plain old wrist action and common sense.

its true, there may be a re-guard legal fight with the estate of charles addams, but we expect that to be handled easily

part deux - lust as actuators should be made visible agents, sensors too -- every thing that contains a sensor should have a face - for example, any sensor should show a picture of the people currentlly looking at the output of the sensor - this is the moral equivalent of the facebook "show me as others see me" interface or the statistics on google's search dashboard...

this would give us the inverted panopticon (aka sousveillance) - this is not hard to do - indeed, a similar idea was applied for logging in to public wifi hotspots where the router has a camera and display which yo ucan use from your laptop in a cafe, to make sure (or at least, improve your confidence that) you are using the real router, not some hacker sitting near by

this is also psychological. so using information flow control, and tracing, one could easily implement this - given the total number of people who should be able to see sensors' output is small, this should actually be scalable too